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Give a better description of the effect you want to produce and I might be able to advise on how it would be performed in GIMP, I'm not an expert with the program but i know enough to suggest a method (though probably not THE BEST method) for performing a particular task.

What you are wanting to do is not easy, but if you do it successfully you will have gone a long way to mastering the tools in GIMP - or any other raster graphics program. From your brief description of what you want to do, I take it you have photos of two people that you want to assemble on one image and make it look like this was an original photo.

The first thing to do is to save copies of the originals and ONLY work with the copies. This way if your efforts go horribly pear shaped you still have the originals to fall back on !

There are two outstanding problems you need to deal with. The first of these is the backgrounds of the two images. If the backgrounds are reasonably neutral and reasonably similar you might get away with just merging them, but this is unlikely ! If, for example, one was taken at the seaside and the other in a town park you are not going to be able to merge the backgrounds. In this case you are going to have to 'cut' the two people out of their respective images. Their are selection tools in GIMP which are quite flexible and capable of doing this - you will just have to find them. You have two courses of action here. Once you have selected the person out of the background you can either make the background transparent or copy the person and paste it into a new image which has a transparent background. Once you have done this for both people then you can consider the background of the image you wish to place them on. This now gets you into 'layers' ! Put simply, your new background will be the base layer and then you paste each of the two people onto it pasting each one as a 'New layer', so you will finish up with three layers. The base layer is fixed and you can move the other two around until they look 'right'. At this point you can now merge the layers - this fixes them all together - and you have your image.

The other major problem you will probably come across is the size of the images of the two people. Raster graphics packages like GIMP work with pixcels and they do not scale. That is you cannot select part of an image and grab a 'handle' (those dots you see in the corners of 'selected' images) to make a part bigger or smaller. To put some numbers on this - a six foot tall man is only 8% taller than a woman of five foot six. If the image of the woman is 600 pixcels high and that of the man 400 pixcels, if you put them both into one image without dealing with this aspect, she will appear to be about nine feet tall !

To solve this, you need to change the image size in pixcels. Again, GIMP has tools for this and you will probably find them under 'Image'. Select the image you want to change the size of, then click 'Change size' and dial in the size you want to change it to. Normally you only need to specify one dimension so long as you have 'Maintain aspect ratio' ticked.

What you are wanting to do is a real challenge, a surprising amount of work, will take quite a long time, but it will give you a real sense of achievement when you finish up with an image of the two people that looks both good and right !